Something I keep running into with merchants, and I’ve never seen it written down anywhere they’d actually find it.
Shopify only renders the post-purchase page for some orders. It’s skipped when the buyer pays through a wallet (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal), when a gift card covers the order, and on POS. Those aren’t edge cases. On a mobile-heavy store the wallets alone can be most of the volume.
The expensive part is the silence. Nothing in the admin says “this order wasn’t eligible.” So you calculate your offer’s conversion rate against total orders, decide the offer doesn’t work, rewrite the copy, swap the product, and eventually uninstall. The offer was fine. It was never shown.
Two ways to find out where you stand:
- Pull your last 100 orders and group them by payment gateway. Everything under a wallet is out.
- Place two test orders, one paid by card and one by Apple Pay, and watch what happens on the screen right after you hit pay.
Same reason a fair number of these apps get rejected in App Store review, incidentally. The reviewer pays with whatever’s convenient, sees no offer, and reports the app as broken.
Disclosure: I build a post-purchase app (Post Purchase Upsell Abakira), and showing this exact eligibility split per store is the reason it exists. That’s how I learned all this the slow way rather than the clever way.
Good point. Does your app show the post-purchase conversion rate based only on eligible orders rather than total store orders? It would also be useful to see the percentage of orders excluded by payment method so merchants can understand the actual reach of the offer
Yes to both, and the second one is where it gets interesting.
Conversion is counted against offers actually shown, step by step. 320 shown, 96 accepted reads as what it is. Total store orders are never the denominator, because that would blend in all the orders that never saw the page and make a fine offer look broken.
For reach, the app samples your recent orders and splits them three ways: can receive an offer (card checkouts, Shop Pay included), wallets and BNPL (PayPal, Klarna and friends), and structural exclusions (gift cards, POS, no shipping address, multi-currency).
One limit I’d rather say out loud: Apple Pay and Google Pay often ride through Shopify Payments, where the order data looks identical to a regular card, so no app can single them out from the outside. We therefore present the excluded share as a floor and the addressable share as a ceiling, not a promise.
Screenshots below. The numbers are demo data from our listing, because my own store is a dev store full of test orders and its panel reads a very boring 100%.
Hi there @abakira
This is an interesting observation. Post-purchase offers are available only for certain checkout flows, so your results might be skewed if you compare performance against all orders. Analyzing by payment type prior to looking at results is a far better tactic. And it’s always good to test at different payment methods yourself whenever you make changes so you know exactly which of your customers will be getting the offer. That context can save you from unneccessarily optimizing or removing an offer that is truly working well for the orders it is eligible to serve.
